6 quiet habits for working with data & Excel

There are no fancy Excel stunts here. These are 6 simple pointers that escape the Excel tutorials. Like anything that's done well, there are personal habits that quietly develop to keep you focused or avoid traps:

• Use color coded tabs for guidance.
• Always know where you're going and what the finish line looks like.
• When you receive a new dataset throw it into a pivot table.
• Build complex formulas in small steps.
• Don't hide row 1 or column A.
• Think "data management" because Excel is only a tool.